Behind the Smile
A Kantian Take on Authenticity
What about that salesman? Walks up with a big smile and starts talking like he’s known you since high school. He’s not happy to see you. Just out to sell you something. He’s only out to use you.
The reality could be better or worse than that.
Let’s start with the worse. A salesman I worked with years ago repeatedly mocked customers who bought cars from him as soon as they left. He bragged about taking a man’s shoe as a deposit when the prospect claimed to be out of cash (because we were prohibited from bringing an offer to a manager without earnest money). He refused to return the shoe for an hour. This same salesman bragged about punting a cat off a roof like a football.
Now consider the better. Years later, I greeted customers in the service lane of a different dealership with a smile and a plan to sell stuff. The connection between the smile and the selling fit into a formula for success. Even if gloom permeated the inside, a smile had to beam from the face.
If we set authenticity as our only measure for morality, then both scenarios would fall equally short. Or perhaps the cat kicker would hold the higher moral ground since his smile authentically reflected his enjoyment of conning people.
What principle explains our feeling that the first scenario is clearly immoral? The answer, according to an eighteenth-century philosopher from Königsberg, is a “Principle of Humanity.”
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end.
— Immanuel Kant
By this yardstick, the cat kicker obviously fell short. He used customers to serve his own ends with little regard for their value as people.
What about me smiling without feeling happy? That smile served my ends. It determined my income. Did I fall just as short? Why or why not?
No, I did not fall short — the words “merely” and “at the same time” in Kant’s principle saved me. We all use one another all day long every day. We use bus drivers to transport us. We use doctors to heal us. We use professors to teach us. The key is to view others as ends in themselves even while using them as means.
My smile obeyed both parts of the principle. Pretending happiness when feeling dejection did nothing to lessen my appreciation of any customer’s humanity. Neither me nor any of them would have benefited from the absence of a fake smile.
Is Authenticity Overrated?
— Gillian McCann and Gitte Bechsgaard
Avoid jumping quickly to a conclusion the next time you distrust a salesman’s smile. He may be putting on a brave front, like I did in the midst of my second bout of depression when leaving home took every ounce of strength and courage. Or he might be a cat kicker.
The authenticity quote above came from this nice piece in Psychology Today:
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like my story about dealing with wealthy business owners:
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Note to the Illumination curator: This article may be categorized primarily under “Philosophy.”
